(Todd A. Smith)
From the beginning, athlete Tommy Hendricks stood out from the pack at Little League flag football.
If people see the team picture of the 1985 Inwood Dad’s Club (IDC) flag football Patriots, Hendricks looks like a big brother taking a picture with a bunch of his little brothers and little cousins.
At IDC, Hendricks was so good that his parents had to carry his birth certificate because opposing parents did not believe he was the same age as their children.
Never once, to my recollection, did the police come out because he was so much better than everyone else.
Hendricks was my teammate on the Patriots flag football team.
He was also my basketball teammate at Eisenhower High School (Ike) in Houston.
In fact, if you played sports at Ike during his tenure, Hendricks was probably your teammate too because he lettered in four sports (football, basketball, baseball and track and field).
His dad, Thomas Hendricks, Jr., was a former football star at Michigan before becoming a standout coach in the Houston area.
His older brother also played college football, if my memory serves me correctly.
The younger Hendricks won a national championship at Michigan in 1997, playing in the same secondary as Heisman Trophy winner Charles Woodson.
His teammate Tom Brady could not even win the starting quarterback job from Brian Griese.
That is how good that Wolverines team was in the late 1990s.
Hendricks did not get drafted.
But he played in the NFL for the Miami Dolphins and Jacksonville Jaguars.
Parents may have done a double take when watching Hendricks as a flag football star.
But they did not do anything stupid.
However, parents who recently complained about a young soccer prodigy are doing their own children an injustice.
Youth sports are a great way to teach children how to handle situations that they will have to confront in adult life.
It teaches teamwork.
It teaches resilience.
It teaches hard work.
It teaches how to have fun, even though hard work is needed.
It teaches how to handle someone being better or more talented than them.
And it teaches them how to celebrate the success of others without resorting to jealousy, envy or simply quitting.
However, parents and league officials in Florida did not teach anyone those lessons.
Instead, they taught children that there is punishment for being gifted, while also telling children that when someone is better than you at something, get them in trouble instead of working harder to shrink the achievement gap between them and the other person.
Robert Klemko of ESPN reported, “A Florida youth soccer organizer called the police this past weekend to remove the family of a 3-year-old boy who the organizer said was pushing other players. But in body camera footage of the police response released Monday, the child’s parents are seen telling officers that the boy was kicked out of the league because he was too good at soccer.”
If true, that is a shame because I always believed athletes improve by playing against better competition.
It is harder to improve playing against someone with inferior talent or skill level.
Kevin Durant would not get better playing against me in the offseason.
Although Durant is still one of the best basketball players on the planet, to get better he would need to play against players like LeBron James and Giannis Antetokounmpo.
So, what if James and Giannis get the best of him by playing a physical brand of basketball?
That would only benefit Durant if the Houston Rockets had a long playoff run in 2027.
In the early 1980s, Hakeem (then Akeem) Olajuwon walked on to the University of Houston basketball team.
He did not play much as a redshirt freshman.
To get better, Olajuwon started frequenting the Fonde Recreation Center in Houston to battle Moses Malone of the Rockets, the reigning MVP of the NBA.
Malone did not take it easy on Olajuwon.
And the future NBA MVP (1993-94) had to up his game tremendously if he wanted to get on the court at Fonde with NBA players.
In the end, Olajuwon became a better player than Malone, who was also somewhat of a prodigy, going directly from high school into the American Basketball Association.
Some players are better initially.
But if opposing players do not give up and work hard, the tide sometimes shifts in their favor in due time.
Klemko added, “The child’s parents, who have since publicly identified themselves as Martasia Griffin and Don Pierre, posted video on several social media channels of their son playing soccer against children before the police interaction. In the viral video, Nevada, can be seen dribbling past other children on his way to scoring several goals, then looking on in confusion as Winter Park Police officers ask his family to leave the public park. The parents told officers the league cost them nearly $300.”
What makes this story even more troubling is that parents just did not ask for a birth certificate as they did for young Hendricks back in the 1980s; they called the police on a young Black boy.
This incident comes shortly after the police killing of a 1-year-old Black boy in Mississippi.
Therefore, if the worst of the police department had shown up to that public park in Florida, the story could have ended more tragically.
Regardless of the color of the caller, people should think twice before calling the police on Black people because people should know how a chance encounter with a police officer could end up in death.
Then the killing could be deemed justified because the law gives the benefit of the doubt to police officers no matter how recklessly they sometimes behave.
But adults must behave better.
This young man could become the next Pelé at a time when many Black boys believe that they can only play football or basketball.
But adults did not only call the police in this situation.
They are calling into question his greatness at an impressionable age in which his talents should be nurtured and embraced.
Hendricks’ talents were embraced, and he ended up becoming a collegiate national champion and a pro football player.
Hopefully, this young man will have a similar story when all is said and done.
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